It is 10:07 a.m. and Lázaro looks sideways at the living room clock. “They’re already giving us seven minutes,” he says, but instead of joy, his words reveal anguish.
Five minutes later, his discomfort is evident. He’s gone back to looking at the clock on the wall several times, at least once a minute, and he can barely sit on the couch and keep up with the conversation we’re trying to have.
Another five minutes go by before he finally gets up and he starts pacing nervously around the room. His eyes return again and again to the desperate clock hands and his anxiety ends up infecting me, pushing me into the agonizing pursuit of the minute hand.
Finally, at 10:18 in the morning the power goes out. Suddenly, the echo of the building’s turbine goes out, as does the voice of Rudy La Scala, who for a long time had been trying to torment me from a neighboring apartment. Lázaro lets out a sigh of relief and his expression returns to its usual affability.
“At last, compadre,” he tells me. “I just can’t stand uncertainty. If they always turned it off at 10:00, which is for when it’s programmed, it would be much better. Because then I don’t enjoy those extra minutes, I spend them waiting for the damn power cut and, furthermore, it’s not that they actually give you minutes, because later they often charge you. Let’s see when they turn it on today.”
“It’s like he says,” adds Maritza, Lázaro’s wife, who enters the room with three steaming cups of coffee. She also sits on the sofa and before taking the first sip of her cup, she tells me that she always watches the soap opera they put on at 2:00 in the afternoon — “whichever it is, it doesn’t matter if it’s repeated” —, but that when it’s “the solidarity” power cut she can almost never see it from the beginning because “the electricity is turned on either ten minutes or half an hour later, especially when it’s after 10:00.”
I know exactly what they are talking about. We are neighbors and we share the same block for power outages, the third of the four in which Havana is divided for scheduled blackouts, officially four hours a day, between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. In addition, the planning announced weekly by the Havana Electric Company also contemplates outages at night, rotating as well as during the day, and lasting six hours, between 6:00 and 12:00 p.m., although these do not always last as long and, even may not occur if there are no “unforeseen outages” of generating plants in the country and the electricity deficit at that time does not reach high levels, something, however, quite unusual these days.
After the scheduled blackouts were announced in the Cuban capital at the end of July, the night outages were an exception — unlike what had been happening for months in the rest of the island —, but as the situation of the Cuban electrical system has been getting worse, with regular affectations above 1,000 MW during peak hours, these have become more and more frequent. This, even discounting the prolonged interruptions that occurred in Havana — and throughout Cuba — after the scourge of Hurricane Ian, which led to pot bangings and protests.
Thus, what was initially presented by the authorities as a gesture of “solidarity” by the capital with the rest of the country — hence its sarcastic popular qualification as “solidarity” blackouts — would not take long in becoming a regular moment on the daily calendar of Havanans, which has fueled the discontent of many and has forced them to plan and live with its effects and darkness. A moment — or, in truth, moments — that, on the other hand, has served little or nothing to alleviate the blackouts in the other provinces, which continue to be the same or even longer than when the blackouts began in Havana — except for the occasional momentary relief — and that, although it causes complaints and annoyances among the inhabitants of the capital, it continues affect them much less than the rest of the inhabitants of the island.
Lázaro and Maritza, the retired neighbors with whom I usually talk and accept from time to time a cup of La Llave coffee that their daughter sends them from the United States, claim to be aware of this “privilege.” “It’s a bit ugly to be complaining about not being able to watch the soap opera once or twice a week when almost all of Cuba spends the day with no electricity,” she says, “because things outside of Havana are terrible. According to what my sister in Camagüey tells me, they have come to have less than five hours with electricity throughout the day. Can you imagine? They go through hell to cook and wash, they can’t keep food, at night they can hardly sleep with the heat and the mosquitoes, and all this with their grandson, who is a small child, in the house. Terrible. But, on the other hand, I’m not to blame for their constant power outages.
“The truth is that, with all those stories that one hears from people from other provinces, that one does not understand how they can live that way, here in Havana we are kings” says Lázaro. “Actually, we are kings in the land of the blind where the one-eyed are kings. But that doesn’t mean that because we’re better off than the blind, we’re fine, because we’re still one-eyed, right? In order to be fine, there shouldn’t be any one-eyed or blind people.”
Electric system in Cuba. Complications at least until December 2022
***
After drinking my coffee, I say goodbye to Maritza, who returns to the kitchen to finish lunch. She already has “almost everything prepared,” she tells me when I return the cup, because on the days of “the solidarity” blackout, she gets up earlier to cook the rice and make the beans in the electric pot, and she only has to “give them the last touch” in the pressure cooker and “make mincemeat with the potatoes we got the other day on the ration book.” Lázaro, on the other hand, takes advantage of my departure to accompany me and thus “stretch his legs,” and as we go down the stairs he resumes our dialogue prior to the blackout, about “the disaster” that he considers will be the publicized Cuban Baseball Elite League and the way in which, in his opinion — and in that of many fans — the island’s baseball authorities have “made fools of themselves” with the non-arrival of the uniforms on time and the delay in the start of the tournament.
We didn’t get to discuss much of the subject — on which, moreover, we practically agree — because, already on the street, an argument between two men at the entrance of a neighboring building diverts our attention. It is not a violent conversation or with offensive words, at least for the moment, but its loudness and the place in which it occurs prevent it from going unnoticed. And also, the topic: blackouts and the situation of the electricity sector in Cuba. Consequently, already other people, from the opposite sidewalk or nearby balconies, focus their eyes and ears towards their conversation; they follow, with more or less discretion, the arguments of one and the other, and now we do too.
The men are two neighbors whom I do not know very well, although I do know enough to know that their views on the Cuban reality do not coincide at all and that it is not the first time that they have engaged in public discussions about politics and other issues on current events in the country. “Look, Armando, don’t talk to me about the blockade, you know well that that’s not the only reason,” I hear the youngest say, apparently not caring that half a block is listening to him. The other snorts and returns to the fray with a “of course I have to talk to you about the blockade, because if there weren’t a blockade this blackout thing wouldn’t be happening, even though there are people who want to deny it.” And when he tries to continue, the younger man interrupts him to make his disagreement clear and reply that “there has been a blockade for 60 years, and even in the Special Period the thermoelectric plants were not like they are now when they’re constantly breaking down.”
“Because before they were newer and now because of the blockade they can’t be fixed well,” Armando counters, raising his voice higher to cut off his opponent, but he immediately lowers it when he sees that there are several people watching them.
“They can’t be fixed, but they can continue to build hotels throughout Cuba?” the other takes advantage of taking the initiative and launching a flurry of questions: “And why didn’t they give them maintenance before, when things were a little better, or don’t you know that there are thermoelectric plants like the Guiteras that have been without proper maintenance for about ten years and that’s why they have to be fixed all the time? Because that has been said even on the news. And why has it not been possible to use the famous Russian credit and, instead, a million is being paid for the rental of the Turkish floating plants? And why didn’t they use more renewable energy, with so much sun in this country? And why didn’t they let people bring solar panels on their own before?”
“My boy, the truth is that you don’t understand,” Armando manages to reply, and Lázaro, who has been following the discussion by my side, suggests that we continue our walk “because these two are never going to agree.” I follow his advice and we start to move away from the place, but I still have time to see that the younger man — it’s Osmany, Mireya’s son, the one who sells phone top-up cards, Lázaro explains to me — replies to the other that “the one who doesn’t understand is you” and turns his back to leave him without a chance to reply. “They’re always arguing, but the blood never reaches the river,” my companion impassively warns me. “You’ll see them in the afternoon, after the power comes on, there in the corner making gibes at the domino table.”
***
We go to the other block, where a group of people stationed outside the store tells us that they are waiting for some merchandise. “It must be what was missing from the chicken,” Lázaro tells me, who confirms it with one of those who are stationed there. The truck, the man who rests in the shade on a wooden bench tells him, must arrive after noon and, if so, the sale of the chicken packages would begin after they turn on the power, when they “check” what arrived and organize the queue. “I already got it when he came in the other day, so now it’s not my turn,” says my companions and I reply that I still haven’t, so he accompanies me to where most of the people are in line and he himself gets involved in finding the last in group of neighbors who wait stoically here and there, on one sidewalk and the other, until he finds the last man on the queue. Or, actually, it’s a her, because, as usual in these queues, most of them are women.
I call my wife to tell her that I’m on the chicken queue, to let me know when lunch is ready so I can eat quickly and return right away with my ID card and ration book, lest the truck arrive early or the queue gets hot, you never know, and when I finish the call, Lázaro has even given the last for me, to a young woman. “I’m going to stay with you for a while,” he tells me, “because on blackout days I get bored at home and here at least I can see people.” And yes, there are people, even though it is a weekday and despite the fact that a large part of the neighborhood already bought the chicken from the truck’s previous trip. Like Lázaro himself. And like María Elena, who goes by and says hello and tells us that she has already eaten the package she bought the last time — after inquiring what we were waiting for in the store —, and also asks us, “just to confirm,” if this morning there was a power outage.
“At 10 o’clock or so,” Lázaro replies, “what were you expecting?” and the woman, smiling, affirms that “you never know” and, by the way, tells us that she had gotten up early to go do a paperwork at the housing department, and that’s why she was not at home at the time of the “solidarity,” but because of the silence in the area when she was arriving, she already assumed that the power was off. “Now until 2:00 or 2:30,” she maintains, and Lázaro, after nodding, asks her, curious, if there the power was on in the office where she had gone. “Yes, there was, because we are not in the same block,” answers María Elena. “I had to find out before I went, so I wouldn’t be letdown. But in the end, I was letdown anyway. I wasn’t able to do much because the person I had to see today did not go.”
“It’s not easy,” my companion reflects, while the woman walks away with the declared intention of getting into the kitchen, because, in terms of her grandchildren, “no one to tell them that lunch is going to be late, not even because of all the blackouts in the world.” “I’m going to have to do the same thing as María Elena and find out which block is where the identity card office is,” Lázaro tells me, “because mine is in bad shape and I have to go change it. And it wouldn’t do me any good to stand in that queue, which they say is worse than the chicken queue with so many people taking out their passports to go ‘see the volcanoes,’ and then not being able to resolve because the power goes out. Let’s see how I can find out when it’s time for the blackout.”
That’s where we are when the man on the bench, who turns out to be one of the first in the queue, a neighbor of the usual dominoes on the corner, comes up to where we and another group of people are, and tells us that today they aren’t going to sell the chicken. “They told people from the store that the truck should come in the late afternoon, or early tomorrow, because since we are here now in a blackout, they gave priority to other stores,” he informs diligently. “So, even if it comes today, they will just count what arrives and save it to start selling it tomorrow, so we can go home now without any problem and have lunch in peace and quiet.” “And the line then?” I ask worried. “The queue remains the same,” he answers me, “there can be no invention with that. Later we go back to see how things stand, it’s not going to be that the truck shows up all of a sudden and in the store they change their mind, so don’t worry.”
The man leaves to tell other neighbors, and Lázaro gives me a pitying look. “When it’s your turn, it’s your turn,” he comforts me. “Let’s go home and I’ll tell Maritza to make a little more coffee.” I reply that it’s not necessary, that almost certainly my wife has lunch ready, that I can come by later, when I come back to take a look at the queue. But he insists. “If there was power, I would make a smoothie with some guavas that I bought yesterday at the market, which are not bad, and powdered milk that I bought ‘on the side,’ but you’ll have to have it in the afternoon, after the ‘solidary’ blackout. So do come by, today they’re broadcasting soccer on television and I want to watch it drinking a milkshake, even if there’s not enough time for it to get very cold.”
Author
Eric Caraballoso
